Siemens UC strategy to divide channel

A leading distributor for Siemens Australia has admitted the company’s move towards low-cost, highly scalable unified communications is likely to create conflict between its low and high-end resellers.

Tomorrow, Siemens launches its OpenScape Office V3 suite of UC products in Australia hoping to give its 80 local resellers a leg up into the burgeoning small business market.

But a key feature of the technology is capabilities for virtualisation and mobility, which would make it easier for SMB resellers to up-scale solutions to access bigger business customers than they were able to in the past.

“Customers with 400 to 500 seats are suddenly in the gun sights of the humble dealer where they used to be a solely enterprise play,” said Paul Scanlan, head of Siemens Australia distributor IPL Communications.

“They [enterprise resellers] are going to be under threat.”

A/NZ general manager of Siemens Enterprise Communications Edgar Giesel rejected the suggestion that its channel was headed for conflict, despite his boasting the UC suite had powerful virtualisation capabilities and supported big mobile deployments.

“The good thing for SME resellers is they aren’t limited to SME sites,” Giesel said.

He said OpenScape allowed resellers to handle up to 1000 extensions for their enterprise clients. It launched in New Zealand two months ago and he said trebled sales after winning nine UC deals, mostly against rivals Cisco and Avaya. Siemens chalked up two deals in Australia, he said.

The transition away from proprietary and expensive PBX solutions to open standards, IP-based UC solutions has seen a rapid commoditisation of the business communications space, with companies possessing fewer points of differentiation while being forced increasingly to compete on price. 

“The ball game’s changed,” Scanlan said.

But he predicted that the low costs and ease of deployment along with the mass proliferation of clever mobile devices is likely to open up opportunities for resellers to turn UC into a lucrative high volume business. 

“Tablets and smart phones will have a huge impact,” he said.

On the other hand, the growing demand amongst large companies for tailored solutions for things like video conferencing and presence would ensure that there remained opportunities for the channel at the high end of the UC market.

Giesel said Siemens was working with Polycom and Cisco subsidiary Tandberg to incorporate video conferencing capabilities into a later version of OpenScape Office to be launched in a few months.